Kendall: In Part I of this conversation, Tony Barnstone shared insights into his process of writing his book of formal poetry, Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki (BkMk Press, 2009), and his ekphrastic poem “The Beer Hall Putsch” forthcoming in the New Voices Project.^[1] In this second part of our interview, Tony continues his discussion regarding the central issue of form as an entry point for poetry that deals with difficult material.

Tony: Let me talk a little bit more about technique. Concerning writing difficult material, you asked the question “How?” What about other people who might want to take on such a large project?

You know, not everybody wants to write formal poems. That was my choice, my way through it. But something that often happens—you see this in Robert Hayden; you see it in Patricia Smith and Tyehimba Jess, Kwame Dawes and Geoffrey Brock; many, many poets who have done large, sometimes full-book documentary methods; sometimes there are sections of books about Katrina, about Leadbelly, about Audubon, and so on—is that they choose to do it in the dramatic monologue. Sometimes it’s third person, but often it’s the mode of dramatic monologue.

Here, my touchstone is William Carlos Williams. One of Williams’s great prose projects was In the American Grain, in which he took these short American history pamphlets—about Lincoln, George Washington, Paul Revere, de Soto—took these historical documents, third-person, presumably objective, and turned them often into first-person or into dramatic third-person re-imaginings of the events to make the past present. To allow the voices to speak to us, and make us understand the humanity of the people in the past, so we can understand how their choices and their sufferings impact our own choices today.

If we think about it, in a lot of ways this goes back to the question of translation, right? How do you translate history? Well, if you can translate history in such a way as to do it from the worm’s-eye view versus the god’s-eye view, you’re more likely to translate the humanity of the people who live through that history. Thus, not the top-down, macro-cosmic “History of Ideas” book. But the bottom up, many voices speaking, in an oral history project. And so, yeah, the dramatic monologue helps you get there.

Kendall: The Anna-Deavere-Smith-looks-at-the-LA-riots kind of thing.^[2]

I wanted to talk about this writing project, this project of writing trauma, and the particular difficulties of representation that come up when you’re dealing with stuff that defies imagination, challenges our comfortable world view, sometimes, and involves us in a way with the material that we’re not often prepared for.

During the 1990s, we in LA got hit by a succession of disasters. We had an earthquake, then a fire, which was followed by flooding. There was widespread civil disorder over a three-year period. The LA Department of Mental Health mobilized a large number of storefront counselors to deal with civilians at their place of employment or down the street from it, so that people could go without having to make an appointment at a shrink’s office, and and go through the expense of that. This was just, “Come and sit down. Tell us what’s up: what did you go through? What are you feeling? How’s it affecting you now?” So I got recruited as a have-diploma-will-travel shrink, going to large-scale emergencies and stuff like that. I got appointed by Mental Health to support their team of counselors. And they had a lot of them who spent most of their days just listening to grief stories.

So midway through I became concerned about the effect the work was having on me, and consequently the effects it was having on the counselors to hear all these stories. And I administered a trauma-screening inventory that was commonly given to people who were being treated. The down and dirty of it was that the counselors that I tested were more symptomatic than the people that they were trying to treat. And that’s not even talking about the overhead in the department.

There’s a long history of terms that range from “secondary traumatic stress” to “vicarious traumatization,” that could be applied. Interestingly, news reporters score high on that list. So do writers that write about trauma.

I use that only to introduce the second focus, and that is: You’ve written some intense material about incidents of trauma, and you’ve done it over a long period of time and across different contexts. Could you describe some of the difficulty of writing such material in both Tongue of War and “The Beer Hall Putsch”? The reaction to your process, the bones of it, and steps you took to control those reactions and manage them so you could keep writing.

Tony: Yeah, it’s a very good question. Well...

Kendall: Very personal, and I don’t want you to feel invaded by it, don’t want you to feel like you have to answer it.

Tony: No, no, it’s fine. I’m just trying to think of the best way in. As I said, I’ve been a coward a number of times in my life because some of this material is like nitroglycerin—it’ll just explode if you touch it. And...

Kendall: I would venture to say Paul Tibbets [Enola Gay pilot] probably would not have had that reaction.

Tony: Yes but, again remember that the rigidity of his world view is itself a reaction, a desire not to jolt the nitroglycerin, you might say.

Kendall: Exactly.

Tony: In some sense, my focus on the Pacific War allowed me to avoid the Holocaust, although I had one poem from the point of view of a Jewish soldier who felt judged for his religion by his fellow Marines. He says, “Why not just chop me up and turn me into lampshades.” That sense of betrayal almost.

But I did write a free-verse poem for one of my books called “Parable of the Jew Without a Name” that tried to imagine the fate of my lost cousins in Europe and Poland. And that poem feels I think very much like the problematic “How can I speak about this?” And my own kind of troubled identity as—technically Jewish, not religiously Jewish. How can I tell this story? It’s like the ethical worries about telling stories, and how do I put myself in a state where I can take it on? In a sense, I don’t want to take it on until I feel comfortable with it ethically.

And then, once you deal with it—you know, when I’m dealing with the sinking of the Indianapolis and the people for days floating in the wreckage and being eaten by sharks; or drinking salt water and going crazy and thinking there’s a canteen underwater where they can go eat, so they go down and drown themselves—that horror, oh my gosh, it’s like a horror movie—or dealing with the dropping of the atom bomb, and people whose clothes have been blown off by the blast and people see them walking around naked with their arms spread like this, and they realize they have to keep their arms up because if their arms are brushing their body the burnt skin will chafe and fill them with even more pain—I mean, the horror of that. The child who talks about how, after the blast, his brother died inside the womb and only his head was born. I mean, the horrors of this are—it’s a lot to take on.

So in a sense, I had to often kind of flinch away and prepare myself, read a lot of the material and let it sit in my imagination before I could write about it. But the key thing is, I couldn’t flinch away when I wrote the poems. Without trying to traumatize my audience, I had to make them feel the humanity of it—essentially the pain of it.

If I can shift gears a little bit, because we’re really talking here about trauma. Another one of my projects that just came out is called The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity. I actually did a Tarot deck with the artist Alexander Eldridge, focused on the creative process. Very much for writers and dancers and artists and, well, anybody who’s interested in putting creativity into their lives. However, a number of those cards, like the Nine of Swords and others, deal with trauma and grief in a very direct way.^[3] And the nature of this particular project was that it involves a lot of, you might say, therapeutic exercises, or creative exercises that take what’s happening in the card and try to help you see how it operates in your life.

So how, when I’m dealing with a card that’s all about trauma—Grief. Pain. Sorrow. Disaster—whether it’s the mental breakdown of The Tower^[4] or the grief and trauma of the Nine of Swords—how do I write an exercise that’s not going to re-traumatize?

I’m not a therapist, right? So I consulted Dr. Carl Auerbach who is a professor at Yeshiva University, and he specializes in therapy for survivors of the Holocaust, or of other traumas such as the massacres in Rwanda. He’s also a wonderful poet. I had him go over these exercises, and try to help me. Among the many things he said that were very wise, one of the things that really sticks with me, is that you can feel like you’re stuck in a loop, in which you’re always reliving, without release, your traumatic past. Again, it’s inscribed in the body, it’s inscribed in the mind, it’s inscribed in the imagination. You can feel there’s no release from it.

The truth is, you can’t fix your past. You can’t fix who you were. You can’t change your past. But you can imagine a different future. You can’t change who you are, but you can change who you will be, through an act of the imagination. And so the big project, the big ethical project, if these poems are working, is to not re-traumatize people. Not to inflict trauma upon your audience, but to give them just enough distance from it that they can imagine doing things differently. Imagine themselves in the state of mind, of one of the villains of history in such a way as to say, “I don’t want to be that in my life,” as they imagine a different future. Does that answer your question?

Kendall: Very well. You have to know something about my background. I was a consultant to Harlem Hospital in New York in their injury prevention program, where they asked me to review their material for teaching street first-aid to children—like when you find a body with a knife in it, do you pull the knife out or not—those kinds of questions. My job was to determine if the training itself would induce post-trauma reactions in the students.

In another instance, I was asked by a teacher-union group of Northern Irish and Irish crisis-team trainers to review their crisis-training material for a joint venture with teacher unions. This was one of the first cooperative ventures, as the Troubles were just cooling down. They wanted the right material to be out there. They didn’t want to do any more damage.

So I’m aware of that process, and the advice you got from Auerbach at Yeshiva is spot on, is good. I might add only that you can also envision the present that you’re experiencing, differently.

Tony: Yes.

Kendall: You know, you can lever yourself into a different frame of mind about it. That’s the only thing I would add to what you said. And you said that eloquently, beautifully.

Tony: I’m a poet, not a therapist. And so I’m very aware of my limits. [Laughs.]

Kendall: You know, I quit being a therapist, because my heart was shot full of too many holes. I quit teaching for the same reason. And I took up poetry and pushed my art, and from what I’ve seen so far, the poets know a hell of a lot more about doing therapy than the therapists do.

Tony: Let me ask you a question. What do you think about the great Vietnam war poets, people like Yusef Komunyakaa and others. Do they speak to you?

Kendall: Yeah, all of them speak to me. Tim O’Brien speaks to me, those short stories in The Things They Carried and things like that. And one of the things that O’Brien says is that all war stories are true; that they happened somewhere at some point, whether or not they’re documented, because war is just so phenomenally big and unimaginable that you could say that a chicken shit jelly beans, and it probably happened in a war.

Tony: Yeah. Two things about Tim O’Brien: One, we had him on campus some years ago, and he gave a really wonderful talk. One of the things he said, and I think he says this in print as well, is that when you write about war, all that work of the novelist or the fiction writer is done for you—all of that careful setting up of the conflict and the building up to the crisis—you’re in the middle of a fucking war! You are already at the crisis.

Kendall: There you are!

Tony: You jump right into it! It’s more intense—

Kendall: The crisis starts on page one. [Laughs.]

Tony: [Laughs.] Yeah, exactly. In media res, right?

Oh, the other thing you were saying about the question of fictionalization versus telling entirely true stories—and this is something O’Brien plays a lot with in his semi-fictionalized memoir stories—is that part of the documentary process for me (and it doesn’t have to be for everybody) is, sometimes I work from one source and I try to tell that story, as in the case of Paul Tibbets. More often what I’m going to do, let’s say, with the Rape of Nanjing, or with the sinking of the Indianapolis, or the attack on Pearl Harbor, is this: I’m going to read twenty oral histories. And I’m going to take the moments and collate them together into one voice, because I actually think it’s more ethical for me to invent a character that combines the experiences of many people than to take someone else’s story and tell it, directly.

Kendall: You’re trying to go for truth, right? And you’re taking a huge event with individuals, sing it from their own subjective experience. And you have to do some consolidation to capture the breadth of it, and you have to bend some of the facts to keep them true.

The question is, how much triangulated fire can you muster in a particular situation? I think that what you’ve done is the responsible thing, that you’ve not just assumed that what one person said was the whole story.

Tony: In some sense it breaks certain journalistic ethics, because I’m doing a kind of a combined story. But we’re talking about the issue of translation—writing documentary poetry is a process of translation—it has to do with translation ethics.

You can translate an Urdu ghazal into English, and you can translate it to keep the repetition and keep the rhyme, or you can translate it to keep the allusions and keep the rhetoric, or you can translate it to keep the imagery, or the tone of voice, or some kind of combination of them. Chances are you’re not gonna get all the things that make it work in that culture into English. So you have to make a choice. And the key thing, I find, is that as long as you’re honest about your choices, and you let people know what they’re reading, then you’ve done your duty.

Robert Lowell does this in Imitations, for example, where he takes a source text and drops things out, adds things, writes his own lines, whether Baudelaire or whoever he’s translating, and he calls it imitations, not translations.

If you’re honest about it, then I think you’ve done your duty. That’s why I have my notes and introduction to the book. The book is a book of poems, but it has a lot of apparatus to make people absolutely clear what my sources were, what my process is, what they’re reading, if they want to know.

Kendall: Right, qualitative research. You know, you just throw as many qualifications out as you think are necessary, and then turn ’em loose.

Tony: But not on the page. A key thing, this is one of the things I often say to my students: If you want to read “The Waste Land,” don’t read the Norton Anthology version where half the page is text and half the page is footnotes. No, you want to listen to T.S. Elliot reading it, which you can find on Youtube as an MP3, and hear it or see it on the page without any notes. So you have it viscerally, and then later, if you want to find out what every damn thing is—who the hyacinth girl was and, you know, what the drowned man represents, and what all the Sanskrit words mean at the end—sure, do all that research, but first experience it.

Kendall: Yes, absolutely. Okay, I’ve got two more things I want to pick your brain about.

Tony: Sure. Sorry to be so long-winded. [Laughs.]

Kendall: I’m loving it. I’m loving you sharing this. Tony, the first thing has to do with recommendations you might have for other writers who dare take on big and difficult projects, not just complicated projects, but ones that go deep into soul work. And do you have any recommendations for the process that they can use to help encourage themselves, prepare themselves, and take care of themselves during that writing process?

Tony: The first thing I would say is, to start writing without worrying too much. But when you’re in the project write towards the book. Once you see the shape of the book, think what does the book need, not just what does the poem need. And try it. You know, it’ll go through many iterations—like I say, my project took sixteen years; another one of my projects, Pulp Sonnets, took twenty years. Most of my projects take eight, ten, twenty years to do, and it’s only a problem at age sixty-one, like how many more of them can I do before I’m out of this planet? [Laughs.]

But my point is, not to be in a rush, but write towards the book. And the other thing, I often think about the old movie, the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams, in which he builds a baseball field in his backyard. And then the ghosts of a classic baseball game come to play out the game. The thing that keeps going through his mind is: If you build it, they will come. Okay, it’s just a thing from a movie—

Kendall: But that’s a very useful thing. It’s useful because, like any optimism, scientifically it’s not worth shit, but—

[Laughter.]

Kendall:—but because it doesn’t have to be science, then you can start pulling on it. And what it does is inspiration—it’s encouragement, it’s drawing us forward, it’s giving us a reason to believe that what we do when we sit down in front of our computer is to...keep going.

Tony: Yeah. You’ll always want to give up. It’s easier to give up. But writing towards the book, not worrying about publication—the point is, write the book, make it good, it’ll find its way. Like a child. You raise a child, you want your child to have a wonderful life; but the truth is, your child will find their way, you know, and so you have to have faith.

Other things, I would say... We’ve talked about it in terms of the kaleidoscope; the fragmentation, and then the pulling the fragments together. And there are many ways of thinking about that. Think about a cubist painting where, there’s a kind of a simultaneity through time and space. You see Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase almost like stop-action photography, right? Your poem could be like that, too, fragmented and yet coherent.

Simultaneities can happen maybe through an image in one poem that appears later in the book in another poem, so that even though the image is here and the fragment is here [Tony spreads his arms apart], they resonate with each other. Like leaves of grass. Or like mushrooms that underneath the ground are all one organism even though they thumb their way to the surface as individual ones. So the thing to think about is, how do my fragments cohere?

“These fragments I shore against my ruins,” that’s what T.S. Eliot says in “The Wasteland.” How can you shore your fragments against your ruins? How can you create something that is broken yet whole? So that also is a really good way of thinking, How do I write the next piece? Well, one thing I sometimes do, I’ll take the last line of a poem and make it the first line of the next poem.

This is something that I think about in terms of Hemingway’s writing process. He would always leave a little bit unfinished at the end of the day, so that he had something to get him writing the next day. So it’s a way of creating this kind of daisy chain of poems, to keep you writing, but also to give the reader a reason to read the next poem.

Kendall: Last question: That has to do with “What’s the point of all this?”

[Laughter.]

Kendall: What I’m looking for is some idea of the personal payoff that you’ve experienced, some of the reward for having done work that was sometimes done in hope that it would cohere someday, the work that you hope to have an audience eight years down the road, ten years down the road—but you’re going to do it anyway; you’re going to do it well and see what happens. What is the payoff that you’ve experienced from doing your best?

Tony: Well...all of us have life. Most of us, unless you’re born rich, have work. But the real question is, what’s your life work? What are you leaving behind? What are you giving to the world? And there are many answers to that question. It might just be, being a good dad. You know? It might just be, being a good colleague, being a good friend. Giving back to the community in some way or another. Choosing a profession that does something for the world, whether it’s building bridges or making poems. So there’s that.

I suppose, to be honest, I don’t have a full answer to that question. I do my art in a sense because it’s a compulsion, but also because it’s how I see the world, that art is a lens on the world. It’s my way of understanding the world. It’s a way of encountering the world. I will say that these projects, my own personal poems, and my project books—I always have one and the other going simultaneously—I think they make me more human.

I mean, it’s not just I’m trying to convince the audience—I’m trying to grow. I was a coward. I didn’t want to take on Hiroshima. I didn’t want to take on the Holocaust. I didn’t want to take on World War II. I didn’t want to take on all these things I’ve dealt with over the years in my writing. But, I force myself, to look. And I force myself to confront it. And I try to grow.

Kendall: So if we’re to define cowardice and bravery in terms of the attendant emotions, we’re gonna miss the point. The brave person isn’t the one who doesn’t feel fear; feeling fear is just being human. The brave person is the one who acts anyway, despite the fears they feel.

Tony: I’ll tell you a story. The scientists, before the Trinity test, before they dropped the first atom bomb at Trinity. They had a theory that if they set off the atom bomb, it might create the chain reaction that could destroy the whole planet, and maybe the whole universe.

Here’s the point: They did it, anyway. They said, there’s a small chance that we might destroy everything. Bu-ut, let’s do it.

And I don’t know how you define—I wouldn’t call that bravery. I would call that a kind of a narrow, craven self-serving, you know, serving the nation—we have to win this war! It’s more important than the whole universe surviving.

Kendall: I think they were more interested in earning their tenure somewhere.

Tony: That too, that too.

Kendall: Oppenheimer also knew how the atomic bomb was going to be used, against civilian targets. Still, he pulled the trigger.

Listen, Tony, this conversation has been fantastic, and I’m so grateful that you were willing to share your background, experiences, direction, and hope. Thank you for the time. And I’m hoping this is not our last conversation.

Tony: Same here. Thank you for the great conversation. It was very enlightening. I enjoyed it, although the truth is, it was also a really difficult conversation to have.

Part I of this interview appears in Issue 17 of MacQ (29 January 2023).

---

Publisher’s Footnotes:

Links below were retrieved on 2 April 2023.

1. Details about the New Voices Project (“the book, the enquiry, and the mission”) are available at:
   https://newvoicesproject.org/
   
   
2. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 raises the voices of the city once more, 30 years later (“Playwright Anna Deavere Smith and director Gregg Daniel are collaborating on a new production of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum”) by Lisa Fung in The Los Angeles Times (1 March 2023).
   
   
3. The Nine of Swords tarot card “can represent being plagued by fear, guilt, doubt, and worries that are to a large extent, unfounded. Chances are, the person in question is dealing with a problematic situation or a difficult decision, but his or her worst fear is unlikely to materialize.” Wikipedia:
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_of_Swords
   
   
4. The Tower tarot card may signify “misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin. It is a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe.” Wikipedia:
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_(tarot_card)
   
   

Tony Barnstone

is a prolific poet, essayist, literary translator, and editor, whose work has appeared in dozens of American literary journals. The son of a poet and a visual artist, he was born in Connecticut and raised in Indiana, Vermont, and Greece. He has also lived in Spain, Kenya, and China, and currently resides in California where he is Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Whittier College. He holds a Masters in English and Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley.

Barnstone is the author of more than 20 books, and a music CD of folk rock/blues songs in collaboration with singer-songwriters Ariana Hall and John Clinebell (Stormbarn Music, 2012). The CD, Tokyo’s Burning: World War II Songs, is based upon Barnstone’s book Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki (BkMk Press, 2009), which won the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry among other awards.

His most recent book of poetry, Pulp Sonnets (illustrated by Iranian artist Amin Mansouri; Tupelo Press, 2015), is based on 20 years of research into classic pulp fiction, gothic literature, B movies, and comic books. Barnstone’s other books of poetry include Beast in the Apartment (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014), The Golem of Los Angeles (winner, Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry; Red Hen Press, 2008), Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005), and Impure (University Press of Florida, 1999). A volume of his selected poems was translated into Spanish by Mariano Zaro, Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (1999-2012)/Buddha in Flames: Selected Poems (1999-2012), bilingual edition (Mexico City: Ediciones El Tucán de Virginia, 2014).

Barnstone is a distinguished translator of Chinese literature, as well as co-translator with Bilal Shaw of Faces Hidden in the Dust: Selected Ghazals of Ghalib (White Pine Press, 2020), from the Urdu. The editor of several world literature textbooks, he also edited the anthology Republic of Apples, Democracy of Oranges: New Eco-Poetry from China and the United States (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). With Michelle Mitchell-Foust, he co-edited two anthologies published by Everyman’s Library: Poems Dead and Undead (2014) and Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman (2015).

His literary awards include The Poets Prize, the Strokestown International Prize, the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, The John Ciardi Prize, The Benjamin Saltman Award, and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, and California Arts Council.

Among Barnstone’s multi-media projects: The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity, a collaboration with artist Alexandra Eldridge to create a deck of tarot cards, each of which consists of original artwork and a double sonnet, in addition to a manual on how to use the deck to generate creative writing (fiction and poetry).

A complete list of publications as well as information about the author’s collaborative and multi-media works are available at his website:
https://www.whittier.edu/academics/english/barnstone

Author’s first-person bio with more details about his background:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APLO9Q/about

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Impure Poetry, an essay by Tony Barnstone in VerseVille (2018)

⚡ Tony Barnstone discusses his work and development as a poet with Mariano Zaro for the PoetryLA interview series (18 October 2013).

⚡ Meet the Creative Writing Fellows: Tony Barnstone at National Endowment for the Arts; includes his poem “The Forge” (Seaman, USS Arizona, Pearl Harbor) from his book Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki

Kendall Johnson

grew up in the lemon groves in Southern California, raised by assorted coyotes and bobcats. A former firefighter with military experience, he served as traumatic stress therapist and crisis consultant—often in the field. A nationally certified teacher, he taught art and writing, served as a gallery director, and still serves on the board of the Sasse Museum of Art, for whom he authored the museum books Fragments: An Archeology of Memory (2017), an attempt to use art and writing to retrieve lost memories of combat, and Dear Vincent: A Psychologist Turned Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (2020). He holds national board certification as an art teacher for adolescent to young adults.

Recently, Dr. Johnson retired from teaching and clinical work to pursue painting, photography, and writing full time. In that capacity he has written five literary books of artwork and poetry, and one in art history. His memoir collection, Chaos & Ash, was released from Pelekinesis in 2020; his Black Box Poetics from Bamboo Dart Press in 2021; The Stardust Mirage from Cholla Needles Press in 2022; and his Fireflies Against Darkness and More Fireflies series from Arroyo Seco Press in 2021 and 2022.

His shorter work has appeared in Literary Hub, Chiron Review, Shark Reef, Cultural Weekly, and Quarks Ediciones Digitales, and was translated into Chinese by Poetry Hall: A Chinese and English Bi-Lingual Journal. He serves as contributing editor for the Journal of Radical Wonder.

Author’s website: www.layeredmeaning.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Kendall Johnson’s Black Box Poetics is out today on Bamboo Dart Press, an interview by Dennis Callaci in Shrimper Records blog (10 June 2021)

⚡ Self Portraits: A Review of Kendall Johnson’s Dear Vincent, by Trevor Losh-Johnson in The Ekphrastic Review (6 March 2020)

⚡ On the Ground Fighting a New American Wildfire by Kendall Johnson at Literary Hub (12 August 2020), a selection from his book Chaos & Ash (Pelekinesis, 2020)

⚡ A review of Chaos & Ash by John Brantingham in Tears in the Fence (2 January 2021)